Dr Hannes Kleineke

Current Research

History of Parliament Research

My work at the History of Parliament has focused primarily on the representatives of the south-western counties of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Wiltshire and the parliamentary boroughs within these counties, as well as London’s ‘hinterland-county’ of Middlesex. These have included a range of pirates and other unsavoury characters, but also more prominent figures, such as the Yorkist earl of Devon, Humphrey Stafford of Southwick, several Speakers and members of the leading county families of Arundell and Courtenay.

Research and Publications

My research interests include the political, legal and administrative history of late medieval England, particularly of the south-west of England in the fifteenth century. In chronological terms, the main focus of my work lies in the second half of the century, especially the reign of Edward IV. Together with Professor Matthew Davies I co-directed the AHRC-funded Londoners and the Law project, based at the Centre for Metropolitan History of the IHR. A version of the project database is now accessible through British History Online.

Current projects include a study of the medieval under-sheriff (jointly with Dr. Matthew Holford of the University of Winchester) and a monograph on Parliament under the Yorkist kings.

- ‘Poachers and Gamekeepers: Four Fifteenth-Century West Country Outlaws’, in Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c.1066-c.1600 ed. J.C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (Farnham, 2009), 129-47,

- ‘The Schoolboy’s Tale: A Fifteenth-Century Voice from St. Paul’s School’, in London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour of Caroline M. Barron ed. Matthew Davies and Andrew Prescott (Donington, 2008), 146-59,

- ‘The Payment of Members of Parliament in the Fifteenth Century’, Parliamentary History, xxvi (2007), 281-300,

- ‘“þe Kynges Cite” – Exeter in the Wars of the Roses’, Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Later Middle Ages: The Fifteenth Century VII ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2007), 137-56,

- ‘Lobbying and Access: The Canons of Windsor and the Matter of the Poor Knights in the Parliament of 1485’, Parliamentary History, xxv (2006), 145-59. (The Parliamentary History Prize Essay, 2005),

- ‘The Widening Gap: The Practice of Parliamentary Borough Elections in Devon and Cornwall in the Fifteenth Century’, in Parchment and People: Parliament in the Middle Ages ed. Linda Clark (Edinburgh, 2004),

- ‘Why the West was wild: Law and Disorder in Fifteenth Century Cornwall and Devon’, The Fifteenth Century III (Woodbridge, 2003),